Starbucks’ racial bias training alone won’t fix a racist society

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Disclosure statement

Ornette D Clennon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

In response to the incident, Starbucks has announced that it will run “unconscious bias training” for all of its US employees. Perhaps in the specific setting of Starbucks, where their staff turnover is lower than most by far, this might make a small difference to the race-awareness culture of its employees. Maybe.

But we cannot escape the fact that it is much wider societal prejudice at play here. This isn’t something that Starbucks alone can fix. When society at large, aided and abetted by the state, is festering an atmosphere of extreme and in many cases lethal suspicion of black people, just how effective can a piece of work-based anti-bias training actually be?

Of course, some will opine that it is a much needed start. For me, a better start would be for legislation to change where it would become an offence to call out the police to arrest people on the grounds of what turns out to be totally unfounded suspicions. Merely being in a public space should not be routinely assigned to guilt.

Perhaps if people knew that there could be real legal consequences to their surveillance tendencies (that are based on unfounded suspicion and shaped by personal prejudice), they might think twice before engaging law enforcement to deprive innocent people of their liberty (no matter how temporary). Businesses could set an example on this front by making it a sackable offence for employees to act in this manner.

Jim Crow at work

The consequences of inaction, however, could cause a catastrophic return to the Jim Crow era of racial segregation. If African Americans continue to feel uncomfortable – or endangered – in certain spaces they are going to find spaces where they are welcomed or feel safe.

UK parallels

Writing as I am from the UK, some may look to the US with smug satisfaction that this could never happen in Britain. But British people should not forget the shame of the Windrush scandal that is sweeping Britain at the moment and bears eerie similarities when it comes to the way certain segments of society suffer from surveillance and a heightened level of scrutiny.

The act also turned civic officers (including healthcare professionals, teachers, landlords and employers) into border control officers. With the act requiring these workers to report any suspected immigration irregularities to the Home Office, the government’s policies have even been compared to Nazi Germany.

So the civilian paranoia of what people of colour are doing is mirrored here in the UK. There is a disproportionate surveillance and reporting of the black body, where both African American and Afro-Caribbean diaspora communities are marginalised and treated as outcasts in their own countries.

Both the Starbucks and the Windrush situations point to deeper issues of inequality, at a time when all people are supposed to have the same human rights. And it raises questions about how people of colour seem to have a lower status of citizenship than everyone else and what we can do to change this.